Every journey by every car in UK will now be monitored

The Independent Newspaper leads with the headline ‘You are being Watched’ as it reports (22 December 2005) that Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all the vehicles on its roads are to be recorded to detect potential criminal and terrorist activities.

In a previous article, Avoiding remote software collaboration disasters, I shared my mixed experiences of virtual software development and offered four golden rules I now use. I mentioned elance but have now also been favourably impressed with another service, Rentacoder, which allows you to post projects to be bid for by software contractors all over the world.

Some of the principles of bioteaming are based on the organisation, communications and behavior of social insect societies. The BBC has a wonderful series Life in the Undergrowth narrated by David Attenborough with a whole programme dedicated to Supersocieties and Super-organisms which shows the warts as well as the wonders underneath the covers. You can see short video clips of all the best bits including Giant Asiatic honeybees and Mangrove ants.

Imagine a scenario a couple of years from now where our governments and commercial enterprises discover that 99% of their documents are stored in a proprietary format (Microsoft) and some serious legal or technical issue has arisen which threatens their long-term accessibility. Fortunately this scenario is now much less likely due to an important international standards initiative known as Open Document Format.

Active Network report that earlier this year (June) Microsoft launched a free programme to enable communities to engage on-line, share experiences and, of course, talk to Microsoft about technology. The Hive is open to anyone who owns or leads a consumer group, blog, or community focused website with at least 50 members. As for the name, they felt that ‘bees were a good analogy for the idea of leaders coming together and cross-pollinating ideas and sharing information’. Any feedback or user experiences on The Hive?

The 12th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising (ICE 2006) will be held at the Palazzo delle Stelline, Milan, Italy, 26-28 June 2006. This is a major forum for practitioners, researchers and tool vendors to demonstrate and share the results of their work in the broad domain of Concurrent Enterprising, which is a combination of Concurrent Engineering and the Virtual/ Extended Enterprise. The theme of this year's conference is "Innovative Products and Services through Collaborative Networks ". For more details on the conference.

How Boeing is building the 787 Dreamliner

Ron Hagerman, Nov 3, 2005 reports how Boeing, competing in a world-class industry undergoing massive, rapid transformation have turned to a new business model based on virtual teams involving 60 partners and 72 sites around the world. See other articles on Virtual Enterprise Networks and Supply Chain Agility.

Anyone serious about developing community, virtual or otherwise, should have a look at the excellent free resources at the Foundation for Community Encouragement. FCE (currently inactive) was originally established by Dr Scott Peck to help groups of all types work through four universal stages of community forming: 1:PseudoCommunity, 2:Chaos, 3:Emptiness and 4:True Community as described in his classic book The Different Drum. However Peck's process is not for the faint-hearted or those looking for a quick fix. For some guidance on the practicalities of "virtual" community building check here.

Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica. These are the conclusions of a study by the British journal Nature which conducted a peer review of 42 scientific entries on both Wikipedia and the well-established Encyclopedia Britannica. To read full Nature Special Report(Dec 14).

As companies are finding an increasing proportion of their revenues outside home markets many are starting to realise that developing multicultural intelligence in their workforces could be a key lever to competitive advantage. To read "Crossing Cultures" article in Workforce Management